Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [9]
I MET YONGXIA AND DALI on my second day in town. It was a hot February morning, the sky bleached a dingy white and the air humming with heat and motorcycle exhaust; in the Pearl River Delta, summer would begin in another month. I took the girls to a noodle shop and ordered Cokes. They sipped them carefully through straws as they told me the story of how they had left home.
I explained that I was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Yongxia turned my business card over and over, mulling its unfamiliar Beijing address. “Can we write you letters?” she said suddenly. “We miss our mothers. We are so lonely.” Through the restaurant window, one of the girls spotted something outside. Both rose and scattered, like a pair of startled birds. “Sorry, we have to go now.”
By the time I caught up with them they were halfway down the block, standing on the sidewalk with a girl in their midst—the prize, the one who had come out from their village the previous year, the one who made eight hundred yuan a month. She was going somewhere, and they weren’t letting her get away this time.
I asked Yongxia for the phone number in her dorm, but she was so new to her job that she didn’t know it yet. She promised to write me a letter. We agreed to meet in two weeks, on the spot in the square where we had met that morning. And then they vanished. They were sixteen years old, on the loose in one of China’s most chaotic boomtowns, raising themselves with no adults in sight. They were prey to all sorts of cons, making life decisions on the barest bits of information. They missed their mothers. But they were also having the time of their lives.
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I FLEW DOWN FROM BEIJING two weeks later to wait for them on the square. We had agreed to meet at ten o’clock, but there were many reasons they might not come. Perhaps they had found better jobs with overtime and couldn’t get away. Possibly they had decided they didn’t trust me. Or they simply forgot, or had something more interesting to do; maybe they had already joined the ranks of the disappeared. Why would they come? My only hope came from something Yongxia had said: We are so lonely.
I waited until almost noon. By then I knew they were not coming, but I also knew that once I left the square, they would be lost to me forever. They were sixteen years old from Henan Province; that was all I knew about them, and their names. In their frilly tops and jeans and ponytails, they looked just like the millions of other young women who had come to Dongguan from somewhere else. I couldn’t bring myself to meet anyone else that day. I wandered under the hot sun for hours, looking at people and talking myself out of approaching them for the pettiest of reasons. If they were in a group, they might be hard to talk to; if they were eating or drinking, they were too well-off. The sight of so many girls I would never know was paralyzing—it seemed inconceivable that any single story mattered at all.
For months afterward, whenever I came to the city, I looked closely into the faces of the young girls on the streets, hoping to find Yongxia and Dali again. Many of the girls looked back at me, wary or curious or challenging. There are millions of young women, and each one has a story worth telling. I had to look into their faces to begin.
I CAME TO DONGGUAN for the first time that February, in 2004. Migration in China was two decades old, and most foreign newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, had done stories about the harsh conditions inside the factories. I wanted to write about something else—how the workers themselves thought about migration. I was especially interested in women, who seemed to have the most to gain in leaving the village but maybe also the most to lose. The assembly lines of Dongguan, one of the largest factory cities in China, drew the young and unskilled and were estimated to be 70 percent female.